Content Curation from A to Z, a short online learning program, with Robin Good

March 13th, April 24th and May 15th, from 12 to 14 (EST)

Three online classes to learn everything you need to know to become a great content curator.

Robin Good's insight:

Interested in being showcased the best and most inspiring examples of content curation online while having me guide you, step-by-step, in seeing when, why and how it is done?

Are you looking to get more relevance and visibility for a specific topic?

Are you trying to gain more clout over your key competitors?

Do you want to create true high value content for your customer and fan base that is one order of magnitude better from that of your competition?

Learn everything you need to know to start practicing the art of finding, organising and presenting the best news, information or resources on a specific topic for a specific audience with this three-class program with me, Robin Good.

Level 1 - Fundamentals - Art, Science and Workflow

Level 2 - Practicum - Discovery, RSS and Archiving

Level 3 - for Business - Marketing, Distribution, Monetization

What will you learn in this course:

1) Why content curation is the future

2) How content curation is going to affect marketing, publishing, learning and search

3) What characteristics are required to do good content curation

4) Which are great examples of content curation already out there

5) How many types of content curation are there

6) Which are the different kinds of tools available

7) What tools to use

8) What are the steps to curate a newsradar, a collection or a directory of resources

9) Where to find valuable content and resources to curate

10) How to evaluate and vet content to be curated

11) What are the legal issues involved

12) How to format and contextualise curated content

13) How to add value

14) How and when to provide full credit and attribution

15) How to preserve and archive curated content

16) How to monetize curated content

Dates of courses:

Content Curation - Fundamentals*

Level 1 - Art, Science and Workflow Friday,

March 13th, from 12 to 14 (EST)

*full video recording available

Content Curation - Practicum

Level 2 - Discovery, RSS and Archiving Friday,

April 24th, from 12 to 14 (EST)

Content Curation for Business

Level 3 - Marketing, Distibution, Monetization Friday,

May 15th, from 12 to 14 (EST)

Time: From 12:00 to 14:00 EST (Eastern Standard Time)

Price: Cost whole course: $249/person Discounted early-bird tickets are available for those who buy in advance.

This has me thinking critically about how we are integrating social media. Inviting interaction has been a huge challenge. We are stimulating new conversations in real world time, but that's not reflected in comments and so forth. I like using Scoop.It widgets to get the newest scoop onto the bog in a timely manner and take some time to reflect on post content.

Tony reminds us that content curators play a role in information overload - they take time to sort, select, comment on good content that helps keeps you current on your topic of interest.

Tony says:

"With the ever increasing amount of online information from social networks, the need for organizing it has never been greater. Look around and there’s no shortage of aggregation tools to help us filter out the important stuff."

Here's what caught my attention:

**In this world of information overload, there’s now a new layer in the media ecosystem: the curator. If it wasn’t for that person who retweeted the story in the first place, you probably wouldn’t have seen it.

**So naming the retweeters in daily promos is the right course of action. Twitter is like a fire hose and Paper.li is selecting random tweets that would have otherwise been missed.

**Yes, they’re randomly chosen but I find a lot of value in them because they praise others for their contributions.

**It reminds me that they’re part of my network and I can appreciate their contributions that much more. I know when I’m named in someone’s newspaper it motivates me to continue sharing that type of content.

For this month's Net2 Think Tank, we asked you to share your tips, resources, and ideas about curating content at your organization or enterprise. Below, read the curated list of the community responses we received - and share your own tips in the comments!

Topic: What are your best practices for curating content? Share your tips, tactics, tools, and techniques for effectively curating to serve your audience. And, if you've written about curation in the past, share the link with us!

Here's a quick working definition to get us started: Content curation focuses on using the web to highlight important information in situations where information overload may be a problem. Many organizations today are writing on the web regularly to communicate with their audience. At the same time, information pollution is an increasing problem for the consumers of that content. As Will Coley explains, "when organizations offer clarity amidst the noise, they build trust among supporters"

This is an interesting comparison and I think it's a good start....... search and curation continue to evolve and there's lots more to this story, stay tuned...........

Intro:

Curation platforms vs Search engines Nowadays, search engines like Google are essential tools for every Internet work. But are they the best place to search anything? We believe that a manual...

Search engines present a list of content, ranked by a relative relevance between the results. Curation platforms like Bundlr present themed groups of content, usually ranked by popularity, but always highlighting the author of the selection.

Search engines work better when:

We’re looking for definite answers The source long term authority matters The quantity of results is important

Curation platforms work better when:

Events are recent or on-going (and traditional sources are slow to catch up) There are multiple points of view Concrete example are prefered to definitions

Wow Jan,This is a great one. Notice I commented on this at the end of the post using Facebook. http://bit.ly/nX8ObV If you send me a facebook request, you can comment back anytime you like and also be notified if someone else happens to comment on your curation. I gotta do some training now back for more later Thiis is great. Did you know you can also share any other Scoop you like from another curator??

Nextly is a free web app which allows you to create collections of web pages that can be easily navigated as a tour on any device.

Via the integrated Add Page feature or the accompanying bookmarklet you can add just about any web page to one of your collections, as well as content coming from Twitter, Facebook or RSS feeds and other social media.

A unique characterizing feature of Nextly is that the content of a collection gets pre-loaded when accessed by a user, making the browsing through elements of the collection quite fast.

When browsing through a Nextly collection all original web pages are reproduced as they appear on the web, and are rapidly pre-fecthed to provide a faster loading experience.

My comment: Potentially a valuable content curation tool to organize specific sets of articles and distribute them in a format that is effective ad easy to access. It can be used also as an effective new reader and news discovery tool.

This a great blog post from Rian van der Merwe , describing the noise you can find on the web now, and especially content just created for SEO purposes or advertisers. As many, Rian is tired of it.

Rian speaks for many of us who are overwhelmed, overloaded with content that gives us no value at all. This is the problem

"I used to believe that if you write with passion and clarity about a topic you know well (or want to know more about), you will find and build an audience. I believed that maybe, if you’re smart about it, you could find a way for some part of that audience to pay you money to sustain whatever obsession drove you to self-publishing"'

Here's what caught my attention:

****The wells of attention are being drilled to depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps” and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be “consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning – just enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs[2]. And the reality is that “Alternative Attention sources” simply don’t exist.

The Scoopit team agrees!

My input:

****The Opportunity: This is the time for all good curators to come forward - 2012 will be the year of the content curator -

**Know your audience

**Know their pain points

**Find and select the best content, add your own opinions, information or anything that will provide more value for your audience

**Select only the best content, don't just aggregate links that add to the noise

**Become a trusted resource - many opportunities will come to you, it's your time to shine

I thought this was good article, great observations and a real grasp on curation and how to do it effectively. I'm going to refrain from reposting all the gems in this post and instead give a commentary on something she said which I thought was a bit shortsighted.

Here's what caught my attention:

"I believe that the people best poised to be curators of the Internet are those from the Facebook Generation -- the first generation of native web citizens, mainly people in their 20s or early 30s who have grown up with the web and can navigate, scour, synthesize and then publish the best of what's out there on a daily basis because they practically live online. It is our generation that will alsobe able to more easily understand where new opportunities lie because they can quickly pinpoint where the gaps are in content, services, and products."

My response:

She is right that people in their 20's or 30's are indeed well equipped to curate the web especially for their own age group as well as others for all the reasons she states.

Having said that, there are people of all ages who have been on the web for years, myself included, who have built relationships and have the ability to spot trends, gaps and potential opportunities. I seriously doubt that people in that age group know what people in their 40's, 50's & 60's might need in a trusted source or have access or the ability to ferret out every potential opportunity on the web. I would be careful about making global statements like that.

**What if people of all ages contributed to a topic together, can you imagine the collective intelligence that could come from that?

What will set a good curator apart from a person who just aggregates links is the context they can add. Their perspective will have been gained through the humility and wisdom of life experience and can add great richness to the original content. To be sure, I have met many wonderful GenYers who have these traits in abundance, but this is one area where a few extra years and a few extra miles can help.

Content is the new currency of the web, it is meant to be a door opener, to invite others into the conversation, building thought leadership and authority. The more people that contribute by giving comments or adding another level of context, not only does it add to our knowledge but it can build community.

I think there is an enormous opportunity for anyone who has the passion, knowledge expertise and committment to select the very best content, fact check for accuracy and is willing to put in the time to learn how to curate succesfully.

Quality curation is not based on age gruoups but on engagement, openness, knowledge, context and a lot of other stuff - but claiming that a curators age is something of particular interest is rubbish to me.

Tony Karrer wrote this post on September 7, 2011 - I find it extremely relevant and am interested in looking at the possibility of curators collaborating on content around a specific topic and how that might evolve in the future.

I had the priviledge of listening to Clay Shirky today talk about harvesting collective wisdom and the implications of that. There are no accidents as this piece seems to be exploring an aspect of this subject.

Tony is reacting to a blog post he read, Ville Kilkku titled: Klout, Triberr, paper.li, and the future of content curation. He has some very good observations, too many to list but I've highlighted a few things to set the tone for the article.

Three Major Trends in Curation

**From individual content curators to crowdsourced content curation: Individuals cannot keep up with the pace of new content, even though they have better discovery tools than before.

**Crowdsourcing can, although it is not suitable for promoting radical new ideas: the dictatorship of the masses is unavoidably conservative.

**From manual to semi-automated content curation: Individual content curators are forced to automate as much of the process as possible in order to stay relevant.

**From content curation to people curation: When there is too much content, you vet the content creators, manually or automatically. Those who pass get exposure for all of their content.

****How do these trends interact? This is particularly interesting to me and it will be fascinating to watch this evolve.

****Social networking of the content creator is vitally important in order to create an audience as isolated content becomes increasingly difficult to discover and

Margot Bloomstein, a content strategist talks about how to combine curation to your content strategy by showcasing lessons she has adopted from museum curators and so much more.

What caught my attention:

**She talks about copywriting issues. Because a curator goes way beyond aggregating which is just gathering content, they arrange it in order of relevance, point out what you should pay attention to and many other important things. It takes a lot of thought to assemble pieces in a cohesive manner, add context to it, ad take it to the next level.

**It is appropiate to give the curator credit if you're going to repost or use it in any manner.

Hey Pedro,
I am the founder of Internet Billboards, my name is Tom George. Do you think you will be curated more on this topic and building a nice Scoop.it page? The reason I ask is I can show you how you can auto share your Scoop.it selections to Internet Billboards.

He has some interesting things to say about an article he read by Ville Kilkku, which was all about the future of content curation, the title of the piece he's referring to in this post is "Klout, Triberr, paper.li, and the future of content curation".

Intro

He says,

"Reading this article made me realize that people curation should be a lot of what we are really talking about here. But before I get to that, let me step through what he talks about. He takes us through a few different models of content curation. I’m going to need to compare these to my post on Marketing via Aggregation, Filtering and Curation – Tools and Resources to see if this classification changes things."

He then talks about three major trends in content curation:

From individual content curators to crowdsourced content curation: Individuals cannot keep up with the pace of new content, even though they have better discovery tools than before. Crowdsourcing can, although it is not suitable for promoting radical new ideas: the dictatorship of the masses is unavoidably conservative.

From manual to semi-automated content curation: Individual content curators are forced to automate as much of the process as possible in order to stay relevant. From content curation to people curation: When there is too much content, you vet the content creators, manually or automatically. Those who pass get exposure for all of their content.

What caught my attention:

How do these trends interact? Social networking of the content creator is vitally important in order to create an audience as isolated content becomes increasingly difficult to discover and curation focuses on people instead of individual content. Build it, and they will come, is dead.

Lots of people might know about this, some do not, no matter what, it's still good to see it in print. Human curation works and will play a significant role on the web.

Excerpt: After almost a decade, Google is somewhat sheepishly admitting that humans are, well, useful after all.

What Google is embracing -- finally -- is the emergence of human curation as a central and critical editorial effort in the increasingly noisy web. Curation, it seems, trumps robots when it comes to both interestingness and editorial tone and voice.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.